Story highlights Six crew members spent 365 days in a Mars simulation in Hawaii

The experiment was intended to study the effects of isolation

(CNN) A crew of intrepid "astronauts" have emerged after a year on Mars... kind of.

Six scientists spent 365 days in a geodesic dome set in a Mars-like environment 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) above sea level. The simulated habitat was located on the slopes of Mauna Loa, a volcano in Hawaii.

The experiment, the longest of its type ever conducted, was designed to test crew cohesion and performance in isolation. It forms an important part of any real mission to Mars as journeys to the red planet will take upwards of six months, before any surface missions even begin, and astronauts will have to spend long periods of time together in a claustrophobic space.

"The UH research going on up here is just super vital when it comes to picking crews, figuring out how people are going to actually work on different kinds of missions, and sort of the human factors element of space travel, colonization, whatever it is you are actually looking at," Tristan Bassingthwaighte, who served as the crew's architect, said in a statement

"We're proud to be helping NASA reduce or remove the barriers to long-duration space exploration," said University of Hawaii professor Kim Binsted, the project's principle investigator.

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